Florian Cramer [EMAIL PROTECTED] said:
Am Freitag, 01. Juli 2005 um 18:53:51 Uhr (+0100) schrieb David M. Berry:
These licenses are written explicitly against the presuppositions and
caveats of the Creative Commons licenses which (un)consciously seek
to use culture as purely a resource. Instead these licenses are
anti-licenses; ethical frameworks or chromosomes of social practices.
I would have two other suggestions for people who want to make their work
freely available, but dislike CC:
here follows a text written for the Arteleku (http://www.arteleku.net)
review Zehar in which I try to compare the options taken by CC and Licence
Art Libre
Creative Commons in context
Adaptation of the Creative Commons (CCs) to various European legislation
has provoked a flurry of articles in the press. The reason most often
adduced for their importance is that they would make it possible for many
Internet users to do something legally which could currently land them in
court downloading music free of charge. The Creative Commons would put an
end to the war between the distributors, users, artists and producers.
Our view of this conflict may be conditioned by the polarisation of the
participants. In the current debate, the conflict is defined as being one
of simple opposition: bootleggers v large companies. We consider this
polarisation to be dubious, given that it silences the space from which we
seek to understand/ place the artists/writers/coders/researchers, etc. It
is built on a twin amalgam:
- the economy of musical creation backs a war which faces off the large
companies against the users of music files, strategically likened to
pirates.
- the artistic economies are reduced to the paradigm of commercial
musical production.
It is really quite disappointing that, in this scheme of things, the only
position that remains for artists is very close to that of the producers
-- poor creators pillaged by the greed of the Internauts. Thus, the
artist, as if under a spell, expresses solidarity with his or her
distributor. If we conduct a bit of research, however, we clearly see
that artists are far from being unanimous on this question. Many consider
that citation, sampling, remix and reappropriation of existing
resources all form part of a certain artistic practices. And there are
many and sometimes concurrent reasons why large numbers of artists
severely criticise the notion of (the rights to) authorship. It would be
difficult to find a common thread to the postmodern reinterpretations of
Sherrie Levine and Elaine Sturtevant; the pop appropriation of Warhol or
Lichtenstein; the deterrent policy of the situationists and the
collaborative openings of mail-art. The theoretical
influences/affiliations surrounding them (postmodernism, situationism,
critical feminism, etc) are also different and even sometimes competing.
And if we leave the area of high art and look at pop culture, we can
also hear dissonant voices: from the pragmatic criticism of Courtney
Love1, through the rebellion of Prince/The Love symbol2, to the numerous
lawsuits filed against fans who have made a range of less than indulgent
re-interpretations of TV series or commercial productions3. Finally, a
growing number of artists are showing themselves to be sensitive to the
problems raised by the evolution of author's rights in these international
problems: their role in supporting America's industrial and commercial
hegemony (transformation of European author's rights (royalties) into
copyright, pillaging of the intellectual resources of developing
countries4, etc)
It is easy to show up the bias in this analysis and bring out its true
purpose. In an attempt to protect artistic creation, strong pressure is
being brought to bear to achieve and ensure technical and legal measures
are taken that will greatly outweigh the financial problems of the
musicians and their representatives: confiscation of the dissemination
tool -- in this case the Internet -- the strengthening of the monopolies
of certain players (the ever greater power of management companies), the
consolidation of control policies (EUCD5), etc.
All of these features need to be examined in greater detail, but within
the framework of this presentation, we will centre on the Creative Commons
which have grown up in the fertile terrain of this criticism and this
dimension on author's rights. If the Creative Commons have drawn heavily
from the critique/controversy sparked by author's rights, they have also
been inspired by the alternatives that preceded them. In order to
understand the complexity of the Creative Commons proposal, we want to
place it in some perspective, by briefly looking at the nature of the
General Public Licence , one of the major alternatives to the use of
intellectual property, as used by big business and software
multinationals. We also want to compare the Creative Commons with another
proposal which has received less media coverage, the Free Art Licence.
